Charlton Lyons - 37.5 Percent

37.5 Percent

Lyons lost to McKeithen in the March 3, 1964, general election, but his 297,753 ballots (37.5 percent), helped to pave the way for the victory in Louisiana that November of the Goldwater-Miller presidential electors. McKeithen polled 469,589 votes (60.7 percent). The last of the States' Rights Party gubernatorial nominees in Louisiana history, Thomas S. Williams from the town of Ethel in East Feliciana Parish, received 6,048 votes, or 1.8 percent.

Lyons polled majorities in five parishes, Caddo, Bossier, Claiborne, Lincoln, and De Soto, all in north Louisiana. He polled more than 47 percent in East Baton Rouge and Webster parishes. In La Salle Parish, which had supported Richard Nixon in 1960 and Taylor W. O'Hearn, another Louisiana Republican pioneer, for the U.S. Senate in 1962, Lyons drew less than 30 percent of the vote, a factor explained by the geographic location of La Salle near McKeithen's native Caldwell Parish.

In victory, McKeithen was magnanimous toward his rival: "My opponent waged a tremendous campaign for a man of his age. I am glad I don't have to run against him again." The since defunct Shreveport Journal observed that the Republican vote was "not so much a vote against John McKeithen, who had already taken the district in Democratic balloting, as it was an expression of endearment for a man who is regarded as one of our most outstanding citizens."

Billy J. Guin, later the Shreveport public utilities commissioner who had been one of five Republican state legislative candidates from Caddo Parish on the Lyons ticket, described Lyons as "a good man who wanted to change the political complexion of Louisiana. He built the Republican Party in its present form. He was a great campaigner, and there was much grassroots fervor. When he began to make inroads, the sheriffs and other Democratic officeholders proceeded to block his election." Two Republicans were elected to the legislature on the Lyons slate, Morley Hudson and Taylor O'Hearn. Two other Caddo legislative candidates who lost were Edd Fielder Calhoun (1931-2012), an insurance agent and civic figure originally from Oklahoma City and Art Sour, who made his livelihood in the oil business. Sour lost again in 1968 but rebounded in 1972 to win a seat in the state House, which he held for twenty years.

Lyons' strength was reflective of that of former Little Rock Mayor Pratt C. Remmel, the 1954 Republican gubernatorial nominee in neighboring Arkansas. Remmel—-a decade before Lyons—-also polled 37 percent of the vote in his hard-fought race against the Democrat Orval Eugene Faubus and won six of the state's seventy-five counties. Remmel paved the way for the election twelve years later of Winthrop Rockefeller. Lyons was the forerunner for David C. Treen, fifteen years later the first modern-day Republican to have been elected governor of Louisiana.

Four months before McKeithen defeated Lyons, the Mississippi Republican pioneer Rubel Phillips wage a similar campaign with comparable results against Democratic gubernatorial nominee Paul B. Johnson, Jr., of Hattiesburg.